There’s been a lot of talk about Facebook in past months, even more than usual with the announcement of the social graph and their new privacy policies.
Facebook has undergone countless changes to its privacy policy. Typically, Facebook creates a change, there is a modest outcry, then people forget about it and wall posting reverts back to normal. However, this time around, the outcry appeared to resonate more deeply. The sentiment that Facebook cares about Facebook first, and its users second, is spreading. As Farhad Manjoo argues all the naysayers will soon get over it and start using Facebook as usual.
But will this always be the case? Is Facebook too big to fail?
Maybe, but they’ve got a lot more slack to work with on the privacy front. 75% of Facebook’s draw is that everyone else is already on it. While both Friendster and Myspace saw catastrophic declines once a core number of users began to migrate away, no social network (at least in north America) has ever approached the level of ubiquity that Facebook has reached. This will be a strong buffer against atrophy that will keep Facebook a player for at least the next decade.
I’m confident they’ll still be a player five, ten years out, but will they be the dominant player they are today? If they push much harder they risk losing the early adopter/power user set. This would mostly be comprised of the college students and twenty-somethings that made up the majority of Facebook’s demographic in the early years. If Facebook becomes onerous – and a cooler alternative appeared- this crowd would eventually begin leaving in droves (I imagine that this is why Facebook is rumored to be trying to acquire Foursqure).
But could even this budge Zuckberberg’s hegemony?
Youth culture of course plays a central role in propagating new trends in music, fashion etc. and this is how Facebook established themselves in the first place: get all the college kids hooked, then slowly widen the net until you have a mainstream product. Could this process also happen in reverse? Could a coolness-drain eventually kill Facebook? Big companies can’t always just buy the hot new property. Just ask Microsoft.
In any case, the 2010s will be an interesting decade for social media
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